What You Can Get Away With

Ideas are bulletproof.

Tuesday, December 07, 2004

Moving day

This blog has now moved and can be found here. If you're reading this, chances are that you're doing it by a feed, which has also moved and can now be found here. These old Blogger pages willstill be here so all the old permalinks will continue to work, and you can access them here.

Monday, December 06, 2004

Switching

OK, I think I'm ready to make the switch from Blogger over to WordPress, which I'll probably do tomorrow morning so I've got the whole evening to think of things I've forgotten to do - the address should stay just about the same (though if you're linking to index.html you'll need to change it to index.php) and old pages won't be converted, but they'll stay in the same place so permalinks won't be broken.

I've checked it in Firefox and IE, and everything seems to be working fine in both of them, but if any of you (especially people with Safari or other browsers) want to check it out and let me know if there are any issues then I'd be very grateful - you can see it in its temporary home here. All being well, I'll do the switch sometime tomorrow morning, so there may be a short time that things look a bit weird or links don't work, but when that's done it should be fine. Again, let me know if it doesn't.

Sunday, December 05, 2004

News you may be able to use

The Royal Naval Association (RNA) Southend-On-Sea conducts the yearly event because back in 1981, a "shipmate" had visited the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor and while there, he presented the Memorial authorities with a branch plaque. In return, the RNA Southend branch was presented with a U.S. flag that had been flown over the Memorial at the time of his visit, together with the state flag of Hawaii.

Following this exchange, the RNA Southend chapter decided to organize an annual event to commemorate the December 7th attacks and honor those who lost their lives.

Since the beginning of this memorial, the association has received a Citation of Merit from the Secretary of the U.S. Navy in 1987, and a personal letter from President William J. Clinton in 1995, thanking the UK citizens for remembering the US’ fallen veterans.

Each year, Sailors of Commander, U.S. Naval Activities, head down to Southend to take part in the parade march from the RNA club to St. Mary’s church where a memorial service is held. This year’s ceremony is to take place with approximately 35 Sailors along with a color guard detail to parade the national ensigns of the United Kingdom and United States while in route from the club to the church and back.

Please note that you will not be required to show ID to read this blog

Chris Lightfoot has some comments on the ID Cards Bill, which should help to put to rest the idea that this Goverment is composed of anything other than crazed authoritarians determined to not only force us all to register everything but our inside leg measurements on a national database and make us all effectively have to carry an ID card at all times but also want to make us pay for the supposed privilege. And if anyone even tries to use the 'if you've got nothing to hide, there's nothing to fear' non-argument, I'm going to personally sign them up to have every room in their house wired up with CCTV cameras, along with a camera crew to follow and film everything they do when outside the house. After all, if they're such morally upright citizens they shouldn't mind having their every (waking or not) moment filmed to be displayed at a time and place decided by me for the edification of our fellow citizens.

Changes afoot

Well, I've decided to follow up what I said this morning and I've installed WordPress. No changes here for the moment, as I'm going to play with it for a while as I try to work out what everything does and just how many ways there are for me to break it. So, if you want to see what it's like to watch someone virtually tear their hair out, visit here. And there's a nice little description of it here: "because I don't mind tinkering with my Weblog software until dawn as long as its code is ideologically pure."

I have a feeling they'll be hearing the screams of frustration for miles around. But it'll be worth it. Tell me it'll be worth it.

Update: Well, it's not too bad. After a long afternoon of banging my head against the keyboard, I've got it looking and working vaguely the way I want it to, and I'm learning about PHP and CSS as I go. Incredibly, I don't seem to have broken anything yet - well, nothing I couldn't fix afterwards. Unless you happen to be looking at it in Internet Explorer, of course.